Totally agreed. And also I edited my post because it was missing the word “not” in the sentence you quoted. As in, it’s NOT the case that DRGs system causes burnout. I think you read my intent correctly regardless.
When DT was announced and the early articles came out talking about the class system, I was REALLY hoping it was going to be something more like Payday 2. I had a vision of their being all these mini-skill trees for different types of weapons, and the actual classes (ogryn, vet, etc) would have their own class-specific skill trees on top of it. Would’ve been pretty bad ass. I’m actually thinking of going back to Payday 2 for a bit. There’s been a ton of content over the past 1.5 years since I last played. Would be fun to dive back in. I can’t even bring myself to go to Vermintide 2 right now, unfortunately.
The whole GaaS thing feels very similar to the late 2000s MMO boom tbh. All of these companies are trying to mimic the success of the handful of games who actually do it well, but because they’re more interested in trying to milk the audiences of those games instead of making an actual good game you end up with a bunch of half baked titles trying to ape designs and mechanics nobody tried to understand, that inevitably fail and are largely forgotten.
If things continue like this DT will end up the equivalent of whatever C list “WoW killer” nobody has thought about since 2008.
The worst (but really, the most predictable) part is that instead of these companies going “Well we’ll just have to make our game better so that people sink their limited hours and money into that instead of our competition”, they went “Well we’ll just have to cut more costs and lean harder into exploiting the primitive reptile part of their brains”.
FS is at both extremes. They do genuinely have a seriously enjoyable game underneath all that manipulation, but they’ve also leaned so hard into the manipulation that people are just getting pissed and leaving.
Edit: Actually, they haven’t leaned into the manipulation that badly. There’s thankfully no season passes or crap like that. It’s more that there’s a bunch of design elements here that typically support such a system (RNG, resource siloing, mission select, etc) that people hate.
A pretty accurate take on the current market. Thing with “tide” games is that they are in a pretty cornered market. You got L4D which is old, but still played, and Vermin/Darktide. Some others pop up but never succeed. Personally I don’t think the issue with Darktide is milking the audience. I think it’s the opposite. The total disconnect from the audience, and what can only be described as general ineptitude among development of the game. I don’t know if it is a leadership problem, or a staffing problem. Something is clogging the gears here, and it’s just bringing the whole company down. Been like this since they made Vermintide.
It’s the same cycle with every game.
Make hyped game.
Game releases.
Isn’t in a good state and missing stuff, but has a huge playerbase.
Devs let the issues linger and ignore complaint.
Playerbase dwindles to nothing.
Game is fixed and how it should’ve been 2 years later.
All the players forgot about it and don’t come back.
I think there’s a part you’re missing from the second half. It’s also that it’s never the dev team’s fault the game did poorly, but that there isn’t a market for it. That’s what happened with DoW 3. Instead of owning up to it they said there wasn’t a market for that type of game anymore, and single handedly killed the DoW franchise with that one move. While I doubt the same will happen to the Tide series because of it’s amazing launch sales, the lack of accountability and blaming the customers for game failures is a major problem within the current industry.
you should definitely not follow FS on linkedin, amount of disconnect from reality is absymal. latest post says that they are proud that their games age like fine wine.
